Dexter Allen, 3 p.m.

DexterAllen.com

I had the luxury of seeing Dexter Allen for the first time in 2011, at the Windy City's blues festival. I heard an amazing musician! Someone turned to me and said, "That's Dexter Allen, the Blues Man from Mississippi." Dexter was born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, the son of a preacher. His grandpa was a deacon. Dexter began playing guitar at the age of 10, and thumping the bass at the age of 12.

Little Bobby Houle, 3 p.m.

Bobby Houle makes his home in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. He is a third-generation musician who was born on Red Lake Reservation and eventually followed in the footsteps of his grandfather, Robert "Bashful Bob" Houle - a member of the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame and National Rockabilly Hall of Fame - and father, Robert Houle Jr.

A self-taught musician like his elders, Bobby began playing guitar in high school. He wasn't exactly following in his grandfather's and father's footsteps of country music. Bobby said, "I don't know how I fell into the blues, but once I did I was hooked on it. I love playing the blues, because each performance will be different from the previous performance."

In 2005 Little Bobby released his first CD, Before the Storm. Later that year he landed a spot on the Last Ride Blues Festival in his hometown, and Buddy Guy was the headliner. What a way to kick off a blues career!

Van McCann, singer and guitarist for the United Kingdom's Catfish & the Bottlemen, has a strange relationship with the song "Homesick."

"I thought it was the worst one of the batch we did ... when we first started recording for Communion," he said, referring to the label/tour founded by Mumford & Sons' Ben Lovett. "Since then, it's become my favorite."

What changed, McCann said, was that other people liked it. And therein lies a great deal of the charm of Catfish & the Bottlemen, a band described by the UK's The Guardian as "deeply old-fashioned - and unfashionable."

McCann doesn't disagree with that assessment - whether it means an indifference toward appearance or, in a larger sense, a band more in love with the idea of playing for as many people as possible than selling lots of records or making artistic statements. When the quartet performs a Communion/Daytrotter show at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn on June 19, expect no-frills rock-and-roll with one goal: to connect with the audience.

The seminal crossover-thrash band D.R.I. released its seventh studio album, Full Speed Ahead, in 1995, and fans hungry for an eighth album ... well, they'll need to keep waiting.

Founding vocalist Kurt Brecht, in a recent phone interview promoting D.R.I.'s May 30 appearance at RIBCO, said the band isn't against the idea and has made fits and starts. It recorded four demos in 2004 and released a Web-only track from those sessions. And, he added, founding guitarist Spike Cassidy "was saying something about recording the next time we're in L.A. with the engineer that used to do our old albums when we were on Metal Blade Records."

But, he said, if something comes from that studio time, it will likely be an EP. "Not that we couldn't write a full album," he said. "It's just we've been so busy touring and stuff, we don't want to stop to put out an album. ... We're just so happy to have an unlimited amount of dates thrown at us all over the world to play, so we don't want to slow down." Plus, without a current record deal, the band is under no obligation to release new material - and getting a record deal or self-releasing an album would require energy that could be devoted to touring.